Maximalist Italian Socialist Party
The Maximalist Italian Socialist Party or PSIm, was the residual part of the Italian Socialist Party in exile following the split that occurred during the first phases of the Socialist Convention of Grenoble, held on 16 March 1930, by Pietro Nenni and the fusionist fraction.
History
Signs of conflicts among the PSI
Socialists in exile
On 16 November 1926, after the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate voted for the removal of 120 opposition deputies, police closed the headquarters of anti-fascist parties and organizations. The direction of PSI was dissolved, transferring its powers to some managers living abroad and in contact with the socialist secretary Olindo Vernocchi from Rome, while sections ceased to communicate with each other. Remaining parts of the socialist organization were integrated in the Italian federations located in France, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Americas.The new direction of PSI was formed by the maximalist majority emerged during the 19th Congress of PSI in Rome of 1922, when the reformist faction was expelled. Ugo Coccia was elected as the political secretary while Giorgio Salvi was the deputy political and administrative secretary. On 10 December 1926 Avanti! became a weekly newspaper, reduced to a minimal format and with Ugo Coccia as editor-in-chief.
Leaders decided to keep the party alive «with its physiognomy, tactics and programme», recommending to cease every trending activity and to act «in favour of comrades affected by the fascist terror». Regarding the struggle against fascism, the party declared its will to operate «along with other parties active on the field of class conflict».
End of parties and first hypothesis of socialist unity
The first party to be dissolved by the Fascist Regime was the Unitary Socialist Party on 6 November 1925, founded on 5 October 1922, a day after the 19th Congress of the Italian Socialist Party. After this event, the co-director of Avanti! Pietro Nenni proposed to make way for reformists within the party, recalling Claudio Treves in Avanti! and rebuilding the unity between all socialists. The direction, with the exception of Giuseppe Romita, refused the proposal of Nenni, who left Avanti! and the PSI executive on 17 December 1925 and founded the journal Quarto Stato with Carlo Rosselli.However, Pietro Nenni was not in favour of a fusion with the Communist Party of Italy : in January 1923, he wrote an article on Avanti! entitled La liquidazione del Partito Socialista? where he considered the merger as a liquidation at loss of PSI. In the same edition of the newspaper, Giacinto Menotti Serrati, supporter of Comintern and director in charge of Avanti!, published an article exalting to the fusion between PSI and PCd'I. An anti-merger movement was formed in Milan on 14 January 1923 within the National Committee of Socialist Defence, which occupied the headquarter of Avanti! and elected Tito Oro Nobili as the parliamentary leader, replacing the fusionist Francesco Buffoni. However, the fusionist group founded the National Unionist Committee.
PSI was then divided between autonomist and fusionist maximalists and a congress was convened for the 14 November 1926 to discuss about the merger. During that, three points were discussed:
- The first one, known as Socialist Defence, was the expression of the maximalist majority against the merger with PSU but divided on the proposal of joining the International Working Union of Socialist Parties - the future London Bureau formed in 1926 with the Russian revolutionary maximalist Angelica Balabanoff as secretary;
- The second one, called Socialist Action and supported by Bacci, Mazzali, Morigi and Valeri, was in favour of the unification but on leftist intransigent positions;
- The third one, headed by the Committee for Socialist Unity within PSI and supported by Nenni, Romita, Amedeo, Schiavi and Viotto, was strongly unitary with the PSU.
A call to the proletarian unity against fascism was addressed by PSI to Unitarian socialists, communists, republicans and anarchists on the Avanti! of 27 February 1927, hoping for «the formation of a strong beam of the working class to oppose against the beam of the bourgeoisie in power in Italy». The Communist Party of Italy refused the proposal, denouncing the maximalist appeal as «a miserable move of the party», while the Unitary Socialist Party invited maximalist socialists to join the Antifascist Action Concentration. Maximalists accepted hoping that the Concentration would welcome also the communists.
Agreement between anti-fascist forces
On 27 March 1927, the Italian Anti-Fascist Concentration was formed in Paris and made a public appeal signed by Claudio Treves and Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani, Pietro Nenni and Angelica Balabanoff, Fernando Schiavetti and Mario Pistocchi, Bruno Buozzi and Felice Quaglino and by Alceste De Ambris. The purpose of CAI was the organization of Italian antifascist forces in order to reorganize the anti-fascist movement abroad avoiding to repeat the old divisions existing in Italy before the establishment of the regime. Communists remained outside along with liberals, populars and others in order to keep contact with Italian masses «in their social defence and political resistance moves». The official weekly newspaper La Libertà was created on 1 May 1927 with Claudio Treves as director.Due to the divisions among the members, CAI showed poor accomplishing skills since its first actions: it obtained success defending the emigrates in France, urging the intervention of LIDU in the assistance to the victims of police provisions. But the work of CAI was insignificant in Italy and for this reason republicans and leftists in particular kept their distances from it without leaving the organization. The leading group authority of PSLI weighed on CAI and imposed itself as the mediator of financial contributions granted by the Labour and Socialist International, of which it was member. Moreover, this circumstance fuelled the left opposition within the PSI, which had its strengths in the sections of Vienne and Paris, where a third formation was formed in favour of the entry of socialists into the Antifascist Proletarian Committees, organized by PCd'I. Socialist left founded Il nostro Avanti in Paris, a newspaper that antifascists called Il piccolo Avanti.
Towards the split
Convention of Marseille
Contrasts about the fusion sharpened at the end of 1927. The area led by Angelica Balabanoff tried to rebut the fusionist moves of Nenni with an expedient: a political line change and a merger with socialist reformist PSULI had to be confirmed by a formal congress held in Italy, not by an emigrated representation of PSI. In the meantime, the socialist Direction declared a convention for 15 January 1928 in Marseille in order to clarify the PSI relations with PSLI and LSI. Balabanova did not participate to this convention, because she was in Sweden as a member of the secretary office of the International Information Bureau of Revolutionary Socialist Parties. Also Nenni did not attend because he thought that «It could be useless to participate to a convention where we can not discuss, until it would possible in Italy». The debate, joined by 30 delegates, overcame the claim of the Direction to limit the discussion to the only organizational field; all the participants, maximalists, fusionist o thirdinternationalists in favour of a united front with communists, wanted to discuss and deliberate, so that some motions were proposed by the Committee of Defence, Filippo Amedeo while others were voted in the different federations, including those of London and Zurich.The convention ended with a majority vote which sanctioned the attitude of the Direction but recommended «the unity of purposes and action of the whole Party for the struggle that comrades of Italy conduct against the fascist dictatorship» and gave a mandate «to the Party Direction in order to hit with an inflexible energy comrades, sections and federations that not observe with loyal discipline to the duties traced by the Convention». Furthermore, all the members of the assembly admitted the impossibility to keep alive a party organization in Italy.
Those results were negatively received by who was openly in favour to the fusion with PSLI. The PSI Direction convened on 19 February 1928 and elected Angelica Balabanoff as new political secretary, along with an executive committee formed by Giorgio Salvi, Giovanni Bordini, Siro Burgassi and Ugo Coccia, who would flank Pietro Nenni in the executive of the Antifascist Concentration. The Direction assumed three new members: left maximalist Carlo Marchisio, manager of the Lyon section, fusionist Filippo Amedeo, former syndicalist and deputy of Turin, and maximalist Franco Clerici, already member of PSI Direction in 1921.
Appeal to the revolutionary unity
Those events were not appreciated by socialists who were convinced about the necessity to strengthen the LSI. Among them there was the Grand Orient of Paris: according to a confidential communication of the Italian Ministry of the Interior, it deliberated to push on socialist leaders in order to achieve the fusion of the two parties «generally not belonging to Masonry», of whose support «they need every day for work purposes and political protection». The intervention of the Grand Orient, which had a great influence in the French political life, was probably defined by factors of international politics like threatens of crises that Benito Mussolini alluded during a speech of 5 June 1927.In February 1928, PSI direction renewed the leading bodies and deliberated a manifest as an appeal to the unity of revolutionary left in which «the two great illusions maturated during the war with the proletariat were attacked: the collaborationist illusion and the Bolshevik one», expecting the liquidation of the two working class internationals and aiming to recreate the international proletarian unity achieved before WWI. Adversaries to the appeal moved resolutely to action starting to push on hesitants. Nenni, along with Amedeo Clerici from Vienna and Ugo Coccia, openly criticized the Direction. Coccia left the direction of Avanti! when the Authority Direction declared closed every discussion about the fusion with reformists, and he was replaced on 12 August 1928 by the political secretary Angelica Balabanoff herself. On 3 February 1929, Balabanoff wrote on the socialist newspaper:
The autonomist majority imposed the ceasing of the debate on socialist unity and took disciplinary actions after rebellions among federal conventions. The controversy within PSI became unstoppable and spread also outside the French borders, in particular among the Italian Socialist Federation of Switzerland which was publishing in Zurich L'Avvenire dei lavoratori, supporter at the time of pro-merger positions. Nenni was alleged to be approached by a «person sent specially from Italy» who propose to him a return in exchange for a charge among fascist labour unions. Fascist OVRA police took advantage from this situation and infiltrated some agents in the PSI section of Paris.
Another cause of conflicts within the party was the role of the Concentration: Balabanoff accused reformists to keep it inert. She aimed to a more wide unitary solution, within the framework of a political line of the unity of all the proletarian movement but without breaking up with the Concentration.